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>I'm comparing the F-35 to projects such as the Falcon 9, commercial avionics, or even just automotive ECUs. All of those outperform the F-35 in every metric, i

>I'm comparing the F-35 to projects such as the Falcon 9, commercial avionics, or even just automotive ECUs. All of those outperform the F-35 in every metric, including reliability. Apples and oranges. Make any of those things you mention stealth, and armed, and the maintenance requirements will match that of the F-35. Its the needs of the application that are driving many of the challenges you mention, not the implementation. An example - the SR-71. Widely regarded as one of the great engineering feats of human history, a marvel of engineering for any time, but especially that time. It's by all accounts a maintenance nightmare. Not because it's not amazing, but because the specifics of the application demand so. Its not easy to mass manufacture the most capable airframe in the world.

jiggawatts 3y ago
> Make any of those things you mention stealth, and armed, and the maintenance requirements will match that of the F-35. You're conflating the attributes of the plane with the attributes of the components that make it up. The buttons in cockpit are not "stealth". You don't shoot the pilot seat out of the cannon. Etc... Just because the plane is stealth and armed, doesn't impose any special requirements on the computers! They're on the inside of the plane, whereas the military nature of fighter jets is mostly relevant to the outside: stealth shape, stealth coatings, armor, etc... Similarly, the special maintenance requirements of fighter jets are mostly to do with the high performance engines and physical stresses imposed on their airframe by high-G manoeuvrers. They're nothing to do with the computers, which have no moving parts and generally are serviced infrequently. This whole discussion reminds me of how many people don't realise that many things are fungible and are designed to be fungible. There's this tendency to "label" things so as to break this mental model on purpose. The most common example is OPEX versus CAPEX -- it's all just money! A more directly relevant example is a customer that was grumbling about how their email was slow to sync to their phones. They were blaming the phones, because they knew in their gut that "phones have slow CPUs", right? Meanwhile, the primary mail server had about 1/3rd the computer power of the phone it was synchronising to! Literally a fraction of the CPU power, memory capacity, and even disk capacity throughput. It was hilarious. What had happened is that they "invested" a lot of money ($50K) on a big and important rack mount server... 15 years ago. The purpose of the server is critical to the business. They mentally labelled it as "production", "enterprise", "server grade", "highly available", and so forth. That's the box they put the thing into in their brain because that's the purpose the thing served. Never mind that after more than a decade, the phone in their pocket outperformed the server in every metric! They had mentally labelled those devices as "consumer", "gadget", "end user", etc... These are just human labels. They don't affect the metrics, the objective measurements of reliability. The "enterprise grade" server had been crashing weekly. It had disk reliability issues (old mechanical drives!). It had capacity issues. Etc... It was labelled as reliable, but it was basically a worthless anchor on the organisation. If they had replaced it with a $500 laptop, they would have been measurably and objectively better off as a business! They just couldn't bring themselves to this realisation. It just wasn't "clicking" in their brain that it doesn't matter how much money they spent, or how flashy the sales presentation was, or what the purpose of it all is. To me, this whole thread is that story all over again. Everyone here keeps going on about how the F-35 has "this" or "that" attribute that consumer electronics don't, while completely ignoring the fact that its computers are crazy slow and out-dated even when compared to directly comparable fighter jet aircraft such as the F-18! PS: After doing even more research, I'm starting to suspect that the cause of the suckiness of the F-35 computers is that the tender requirements probably included "must be entirely manufactured in the US by US citizens", which is a common clause in military contracts. That would dramatically shrink the pool of options, reducing the performance and quality that is available. Similar issues occur with Russian military procurement, because their internal chip fab capability is much worse than what the US can produce.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  Have you ever designed or architected similar hardware?
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Yes. I've worked with "non-stop" (lockstep dual-redundant) hardware and the like, and I'm reasonably familiar with what it takes to get hardware space-rated. It's specialised and more expensive, sure, but not that much. Having a cost or some spec be worse by a factor of 5x or 10x as a consequence is within reason. 100,000x... not so much. I've seen this play out many times with government tender processes. They write the requirements months or even years before the tender officially begins. They write about established technologies at the start of this authoring process. Then it takes a year or more for a vendor to be selected, years more for development, years for acceptance testing, years for production and rollout, etc... That's how you end up with a 10-20 year delay between the current-gen technology and what is contractually required, by a legal document literally mandating that the technology be hilariously outdated by the time it is actually used. The more exponential the growth curve of some technology, the worse this is. If the Army is putting out a tender for uniforms, tents, or MREs, this is no big deal. If the Air Force is building "high-tech flying supercomputers", it is crazy bad. Government agencies, especially big ones, simply have no concept of aiming for where the puck will be, not where the puck was. Combine that with requirements that tie the hand of the vendor behind their back, such as mandating 100% US-made parts, then costs can go into the stratosphere while the technical capability lags behind by decades. You can keep trying to rationalise and defend this madness, but it's your taxpayer dollars being heaped into a giant pile and set on fire.
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      Dual redundant hardware, sounds like a server or IT equipment. Airliners and the like are triple, sometimes quad. Designing a Dell server for high uptime with dual power supplies is one thing. Designing stuff where it falls out of the sky and crashes into a high-school if the computer signal from one sensor to one actuator takes 2 milliseconds too long to traverse.

jiggawatts 3y ago

> Make any of those things you mention stealth, and armed, and the maintenance requirements will match that of the F-35. You're conflating the attributes of the plane with the attributes of the components that make it up. The buttons in cockpit are not "stealth". You don't shoot the pilot seat out of the cannon. Etc... Just because the plane is stealth and armed, doesn't impose any special requirements on the computers! They're on the inside of the plane, whereas the military nature of fighter jets is mostly relevant to the outside: stealth shape, stealth coatings, armor, etc... Similarly, the special maintenance requirements of fighter jets are mostly to do with the high performance engines and physical stresses imposed on their airframe by high-G manoeuvrers. They're nothing to do with the computers, which have no moving parts and generally are serviced infrequently. This whole discussion reminds me of how many people don't realise that many things are fungible and are designed to be fungible. There's this tendency to "label" things so as to break this mental model on purpose. The most common example is OPEX versus CAPEX -- it's all just money! A more directly relevant example is a customer that was grumbling about how their email was slow to sync to their phones. They were blaming the phones, because they knew in their gut that "phones have slow CPUs", right? Meanwhile, the primary mail server had about 1/3rd the computer power of the phone it was synchronising to! Literally a fraction of the CPU power, memory capacity, and even disk capacity throughput. It was hilarious. What had happened is that they "invested" a lot of money ($50K) on a big and important rack mount server... 15 years ago. The purpose of the server is critical to the business. They mentally labelled it as "production", "enterprise", "server grade", "highly available", and so forth. That's the box they put the thing into in their brain because that's the purpose the thing served. Never mind that after more than a decade, the phone in their pocket outperformed the server in every metric! They had mentally labelled those devices as "consumer", "gadget", "end user", etc... These are just human labels. They don't affect the metrics, the objective measurements of reliability. The "enterprise grade" server had been crashing weekly. It had disk reliability issues (old mechanical drives!). It had capacity issues. Etc... It was labelled as reliable, but it was basically a worthless anchor on the organisation. If they had replaced it with a $500 laptop, they would have been measurably and objectively better off as a business! They just couldn't bring themselves to this realisation. It just wasn't "clicking" in their brain that it doesn't matter how much money they spent, or how flashy the sales presentation was, or what the purpose of it all is. To me, this whole thread is that story all over again. Everyone here keeps going on about how the F-35 has "this" or "that" attribute that consumer electronics don't, while completely ignoring the fact that its computers are crazy slow and out-dated even when compared to directly comparable fighter jet aircraft such as the F-18! PS: After doing even more research, I'm starting to suspect that the cause of the suckiness of the F-35 computers is that the tender requirements probably included "must be entirely manufactured in the US by US citizens", which is a common clause in military contracts. That would dramatically shrink the pool of options, reducing the performance and quality that is available. Similar issues occur with Russian military procurement, because their internal chip fab capability is much worse than what the US can produce.

iancmceachern 3y ago
Have you ever designed or architected similar hardware?
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Yes. I've worked with "non-stop" (lockstep dual-redundant) hardware and the like, and I'm reasonably familiar with what it takes to get hardware space-rated. It's specialised and more expensive, sure, but not that much. Having a cost or some spec be worse by a factor of 5x or 10x as a consequence is within reason. 100,000x... not so much. I've seen this play out many times with government tender processes. They write the requirements months or even years before the tender officially begins. They write about established technologies at the start of this authoring process. Then it takes a year or more for a vendor to be selected, years more for development, years for acceptance testing, years for production and rollout, etc... That's how you end up with a 10-20 year delay between the current-gen technology and what is contractually required, by a legal document literally mandating that the technology be hilariously outdated by the time it is actually used. The more exponential the growth curve of some technology, the worse this is. If the Army is putting out a tender for uniforms, tents, or MREs, this is no big deal. If the Air Force is building "high-tech flying supercomputers", it is crazy bad. Government agencies, especially big ones, simply have no concept of aiming for where the puck will be, not where the puck was. Combine that with requirements that tie the hand of the vendor behind their back, such as mandating 100% US-made parts, then costs can go into the stratosphere while the technical capability lags behind by decades. You can keep trying to rationalise and defend this madness, but it's your taxpayer dollars being heaped into a giant pile and set on fire.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    Dual redundant hardware, sounds like a server or IT equipment. Airliners and the like are triple, sometimes quad. Designing a Dell server for high uptime with dual power supplies is one thing. Designing stuff where it falls out of the sky and crashes into a high-school if the computer signal from one sensor to one actuator takes 2 milliseconds too long to traverse.